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\chapter*{Preface}
This document represents the Master Graduation Thesis written by
Andrea Cominola and Emanuele Mason as the final project of their
Master of Science in Environmental Engineering.

The idea of working on a multi-objectives framework for studying
landscape evolution under river dynamics firstly came up in March
2012, while speaking with Professor Andrea Castelletti and Simone
Bizzi, who respectively supervised and co-supervised this thesis.
The idea of putting together issues related to geomorphology and
modeling approaches typical of control theories constituted the
starting point for concretely working on the thesis. From that
moment on, the two students worked intensively on the choosen
topic until March 2013.

The bigger part of the work was performed at Politecnico di
Milano, apart from the period between October and December 2012,
when the two students had the opportunity to perform part of their
research at PennState University in State College (PA, USA).
The students closely worked with Patrick Reed and his research
group, and for the whole period cooperated with Professor
Kyungrock Paik from Korea University. They both co-supervised the
thesis. In particular, they started working by analyzing a recent
\ac{GLE} model developed by Professor Paik, who provided them with
all the needed material. Finally, Marina De Maio from Politecnico
di Torino co-supervised the thesis as Alta Scuola Politecnica
co-supervisor.

\section*{Motivation} 
As the students firstly could intuitively think and then could
verify while working, modeling landscape and river evolution is a
big challenge. As they had the opportunity to verify also while
attending the \ac{AGU}2012 and \ac{EGU}2013 conferences, many
theories exist, but not many significant works exist related to
landscape evolution analysis based on optimality criteria.

The motivation for working on that topic derives from several
aspects. First of all, personal interest captured the students'
willingness to start this thesis.

Secondly, the idea of developing scientific improvements with
respect to a very challenging topic as the one of landscape
evolution under river dynamics, providing new tools, approaches
and results, fostered their work.

Finally, their strongest motivation and hope is that, even if a
single work might bring little improvements to scientific and
technical disciplines, the framework developed in this thesis
could be concretely used. In particular, since many issues rise,
it is hoped that many future researches will focus on the topic.
At the same time, the students are certain that the framework
might rise the interest of hydrologists and geomorphologysts and
be used for real case study analysis, integrated with other
existing tools.